Vows of silence and other paradoxes
In Philip Gröning’s 2005 documentary Into Great Silence we spend almost three hours in the company of monks who’ve taken a lifelong oath of silence in a Swiss monastery. This lush beautiful film gives us a fleeting sense of a life of profound, ascetic quietude.
It’s a paradox, of course, for a sound medium to talk about silence. Simon and Garfunkel famously sang about silence – the poetically contradictory construct of the sounds of silence – in their 1965 hit.
The other side of this are those songs that remind us about sound, words and listening. “That’s the sound of the men, working on the chain gang…” The backbeat of the song is driven by a kind of simulated hammer and stone sound, punctuated by the narrator/singer who tells us what those men are longing for, “You can hear ‘em saying, hmmm, I’m going home…”
The Cascades’ 1962 hit “Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain” begins with the crash of a thunder clap and the rush of an ensuing storm as the backdrop to a lover’s lament. The lyrics suggest that the sound of the rain might be more important than any words the singer has to say, that maybe there’s some information in that non-verbal sound that we could all benefit from.
Context is everything. When Gladys Knight sings that she heard it through the grape vine, she’s framing that, while she does have a certain amount of information, she heard it through secondary and tertiary sources. She sings directly to her lover, needing to hear it directly from him: “How much longer will you be mine?”
In the Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know a Secret” (1963), Paul McCartney first instructs, then queries his listener: “Listen – ooh wah ooh – do you want to know a secret – ooh wah ooh – do you promise not to tell…Oh…Closer – ooh wah ooh – let me whisper in your ear…” It’s a song about longing, telling and listening, specifically whispering, and even more specifically a wish to whisper in the most anatomically auspicious site, the location where the softest whisper has the highest probability for maximum reception: the ear.
Even seemingly simple lyrical constructs remind us that someone is talking (or singing) and we’re listening, such as when Ray Charles raucously rhymes “Hey, hey,” with “that’s what I say…”
More currently, a band called Thursday has produced a lovely echo-chamber dirge called “In Silence,” which accompanies an odd, flickering, black and white animation. Neither the video, nor the tune itself, exactly points to something obvious about silence, or sound, for that matter. But on another level it is perfectly articulate about itself and is somehow broodingly true.
